This Cipher RAID Tower is a great solution for application that requires attaching multiple drives to system and also reliable full disk encryption to each drive. Up to as many as five 3.5" hard drive can be connect to any system via a single eSATA cable and all simultaneously encrypted with a single Cipher key. This Cipher RAID Towers is designed with bullet proof AES 256-bit full disk hardware encryption at less than half of the price of similar products in the market. Not only the data is highly secured by the strong AES 256-bit encryption, the Cipher RAID Tower is simple to use and easy to deploy. There is no software to install or special training required. The FIPS certified hardware crypto engine integrated inside the Cipher RAID Tower ensures the maximum performance of the hard drive. Other than the insertion of a cipher key during the initial power up, the Cipher RAID Tower operates and performs just the same as an ordinary RAID system.

The Cipher RAID Tower comes with everything you need other than the hard drive. Designed for easy addition and removal of hard drives, you can add your choice of hard drive in any capacity. This Cipher RAID Tower can be used with any computing platform equipped with a Port Multiplier compatible controller and is totally independent of any Operating System. This Cipher RAID Tower can also connected to the new Superspeed USB 3.0 port with an optional USB 3.0 - eSATA adapter. By attaching to the Addonics NAS 4.0 adapter, this cipher tower can be instantly turned into a secured NAS on any local area network.

Designed with RAID Volume Encryption (RVE) architecture, this approach costs less than the DLV approach and is simpler to operate with only one encryption key to secure all the drive or the RAID. Performance of the drive is limited to the maximum throughput of the crypto engine of 150 MB/sec.

RVE encryption architecture illustration

Below is a summary of the PROs and CONs for the two RAID architectures:

DLE

RVE

Encryption Architecture

one crypto engine per drive

one crypto engine per RAID set

Performance

maximum 300 MB/sec depending on the speed of the SATA port

Maximum 150 MB/sec

Cost

higher

lower

Operation

requires multiple Cipher keys depending on the # of drives in the RAID set

one Cipher key to activate the Cipher RAID Tower

level of security

AES 256-bit full disk encryption, each drive can be encrypted with different cipher key code

AES 256-bit full disk encryption. Each drive uses the same Cipher key code